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Friday, August 15, 2014

We walked. East. Way east. To find a toaster at Costco, or perhaps at Target. We passed The Urban Garden Center, newly recovered from the Harlem gas blast. It promised a pig, but it was a long way from 5, yet, and we moved on.

Toaster in hand and some startling, culture-shock fast food later (tiny dish of $3.95 pasta Alfredo, 600 calories? No wonder people get fat), and depressed by the awful, giant pet store we saw - it was the cat's birthday and he needed gifts - we turned west once more, walking towards Lenox Avenue.

At 117th and Lenox I found a surprise farm stand, and cheered up. It is there every Saturday. They say. It sold us the nicest corn I have ever eaten. We grilled the ears over coals that night (45 minutes), still in their husks, then rubbed them with butter and sprinkled some ramp salt and parmesan cheese over the top, with a squeeze of lime. The upstate stand (Marlboro, NY) sold a startling selection of eggplants too, and we ate those the following night, with our guanciale sourdough pizza.

Then we found a hole. This is the WHOLEfoods hole at 125th. Get it??? At last something is happening inside it. Three concrete trucks stood churning at the corner, sandwiching (it was a club sandwich) a flattened street sign.

The hole is betternTV.

Finally we crossed the Depressing Intersection, which actually looks OK in this light.

...and were back in our hood. Past the corner social of old men on crates and fold out chairs, past the pee- smelling corner opposite, past the neat front gardens and the boarded up brownstone, past the new condominium and the house with morning glories to the roof, down the sidewalk towards the little fat kid who plays outside every afternoon with the skinny boy and the girl, till their mother shouts at them through their building's intercom, and up our steps, and home.

In House Blogs

Good Food Blogs

Reasons to Dogear a Page

We have art, Nietzsche said, so that we shall not be destroyed by the truth.

Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero

How will we know it's us without our past?

...How'll it be not to know what land's outside the door? How if you wake up in the night and know - and know the willow tree's not there? Can you live without the willow tree? Well, no, you can't. The willow tree is you.

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath.

Necessity knows no magic formulae - they are all left to chance. If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assissi's shoulders.

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

I equate happiness with contentment, and contentment with complacency, and complacency with impending disaster.

Afterwards in the street, she looks around the neighborhood. "Yes, it is certified now."

She refers to a phenomenon of moviegoing which I have called certification. Nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a neighborhood, the place is not certified for him. More than likely he will live there sadly and the emptiness which is inside him will expand until it evacuates the entire neighborhood. But if he sees a movie which shows his very neighborhood, it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere."

The Moviegoer, Walker Percy

The garden paths were lit by coloured lamps, as is the custom in Italy, and the supper table was laden with candles and flowers, as is the custom in all countries where they understand how to dress a table, which when properly done is the rarest of all luxuries.

Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

One of the new things people began to find out in the last century was that thoughts - just mere thoughts - are as powerful as electric batteries, as good for one as sunlight is, or as bad for one as poison.

Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.

George Eliot, Middlemarch

(Mrs Cadwallader to Dorothea)

"I know it's a great temptation to go mad, but don't go in for it, you wouldn't like it."

George Eliot, Middlemarch

"A is for dining Alone...and so am I, if a choice must be made between most people I know and myself. This misanthropic attitude is one I am not proud of, but it is firmly there, based on my ever-increasing conviction that sharing food with another human being is an act that should not be indulged in lightly."

MFK Fisher, The Art of Eating

What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran with them. All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenthearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise.

Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

I was planning on writing about a woman for 50 years. I will never be competent enough to do so, but at some point you have to try.

Richard Chaston (1620-1695). Chaston wrote that men and fairies both contain within them a faculty of reason and a faculty of magic. In men reason is strong and magic is weak. With fairies it is the other way round: magic comes very naturally to them, but by human standards they are barely sane.

Susanna Clark, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell

No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen?